Morgan J. Brittain

"Pipelines" tells a new history of American landscape art and three key moments of entanglement with oil industry colonialism: the modern discovery of oil in the Americas in 1859, the first trans-regional pipeline project in 1943, and the No Dakota Access Pipeline movement of 2016. This project adapts Indigenous epistemologies of land and time to develop a novel methodology. Following the complicated and surreptitious spatial logic of the pipeline, pipeline visuality democratizes vision to resist the ways petro-colonialism has been kept out of sight. By asking how art and petroleum are connected, "Pipelines" exposes unexpected creative visions and ecological violences, intimacies, and petro-colonial contexts that lurk pervasively, like oil itself, in disparate corners of American art and space.